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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Dealing with the ring company',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/05/30.jpg" alt="A snake on the path" class="framed-centred-image" width="800" height="480"/>
<section id="religion">
	<h2>Religious study</h2>
	<p>
		The missionaries cancelled on me today.
		Maybe they get that they can&apos;t convert me?
		I don&apos;t know.
		They want to meet on Saturday though, so maybe they haven&apos;t entirely given up.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="diet">
	<h2>Dietary intake</h2>
	<p>
		For breakfast, I had 93 grams of cereal with 278 grams of soy milk.
		For lunch, I had 400 grams of nachos.
		For dinner, I had a veggie patty, tapioca cheese, ketchup, and mustard sandwich with a pickle on the side.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="diet">
	<h2>Dietary intake</h2>
	<p>
		The ring company wrote back asking what size to exchange the ring for.
		Clearly, they didn&apos;t read the enclosed note, which among other things, told exactly what size to exchange for.
		They said the correctly-sized ring would be sent now, but did say &quot;ring&quot;, as in singular.
		I clarified whether they meant one or both rings, and they didn&apos;t even remember the missing ring that started all this.
		It sounds like they&apos;re sending them both now though.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Cloud computing has overtaken local computing in many businesses, and quite frankly, that&apos;s pretty scary.
			Cloud computing had a number of problems, and companies seem to think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
			Personally, I disagree.
		</p>
		<p>
			The instructions for this assignment say to use our textbook as one of our three sources, but the textbook actually doesn&apos;t mention cloud computing whatsoever.
			It mentions the word &quot;cloud&quot; twice, but both times, it&apos;s referring to weather information in geographic data, and is referring to the foggy white things up in the sky.
		</p>
		<h3>Security and control</h3>
		<p>
			When you have your computing done locally, your company holds the power over its own data.
			When you use cloud computing, you don&apos;t (Larkin, 2018).
			This has a couple of very important security aspects to it.
			First of all, your cloud provider has access to all your data.
			Need something kept confidential?
			Even if your cloud company has been dependable in the past, employees come and go from companies.
			Companies operate through the people that work there, and a bad actor may end up employed at the cloud company you use.
			An that&apos;s assuming you can even trust the company to begin with.
			Working with a cloud company is a huge matter of trust, and trust can easily be broken.
		</p>
		<p>
			Secondly, even if the cloud company doesn&apos;t snoop on your data, they may not treat your data with the respect that you would yourself, and may not implement the best security practices, even if they claim to.
			You have to remember that they&apos;re a company too, and many companies try to cut corners in order to save a quick buck.
		</p>
		<p>
			The main takeaway here is that with cloud computing, you don&apos;t control your data.
			Your cloud provider does.
			And that&apos;s a very dangerous thing.
		</p>
		<h3>Vendor lock-in</h3>
		<p>
			Many companies participate in a noxious practice known as vendor lock-in (LevelCloud, 2015).
			They get you hooked on their product, but they design their product to intentionally be as incompatible as it can be with their competition.
			This means that switching between cloud providers is artificially made prohibitively expensive.
			These providers are businesses, and many of them want to keep your business by any mean necessary, including using underhanded tactics such as this.
		</p>
		<p>
			As I mentioned before, using a cloud computing company is very much a matter of trust.
			With that in mind, when a cloud computing company is resorting to abusive tactics such as vendor lock-in, you can know two things.
			First and foremost,t hey don&apos;t have your company&apos;s best interests at heart.
			If they did, they wouldn&apos;t be trying to lock you in at all costs.
			Secondly, their product is probably sub-par.
			If it was decent, they wouldn&apos;t need to resort to underhanded tactics to keep their customers.
			With that in mind, you can&apos;t trust companies that resort to vendor lock-in.
			They&apos;re deliberately trying to stifle competition, which leaves your company with less options.
			That&apos;s not only foolish for you to buy into, but also bad for your business.
			If you&apos;re going to get on board with cloud computing, it&apos;s absolutely vital that you choose a cloud provider that operates using open standards and an open $a[API].
		</p>
		<p>
			With vendor lock-in, your cloud provider is free to raise their prices or degrade their level of service, an it may be too costly for you to switch to another provider.
			You&apos;re stuck dealing with the cloud provider&apos;s new service conditions.
			Even if your cloud provider is otherwise awesome, vendor lock-in is a huge liability that your company should never take on.
		</p>
		<h3>Downtime</h3>
		<p>
			No matter how good your company is, your servers need to go down sometimes.
			However, you can often schedule these downtimes for when it&apos;ll have the least impact on your business.
			A cloud provider has the same types of maintenance issues, and must also go down sometimes (Larkin, 2018).
			The difference is that you have no control over when they go down.
			If they&apos;re a decent provider, they&apos;ll give you advance notice for any scheduled downtime, so you can mitigate the effect on your business as much as you can.
			However, you can&apos;t reschedule these downtimes for when would be best for your business.
			Downtimes will therefore have a bigger effect on your company than if you ran your own servers.
		</p>
		<p>
			Another downtime issue has nothing to do with your cloud provider, but your $a[ISP].
			Reaching your data when you&apos;re &quot;in the cloud&quot; requires an Internet connection.
			If your data is hosted on-premises, network connectivity doesn&apos;t cut you off from your data.
			When you&apos;re hosted in the cloud though, it obviously does.
		</p>
		<h3>Everything is online</h3>
		<p>
			With cloud computing, everything is online.
			You can&apos;t keep only the stuff that needs to be accessed by the world out there on the Internet and keep the things that need better security off the network.
			It&apos;s just all out there.
			That means that all the computing of your company is vulnerable to network-based attack (Larkin, 2018).
			On the other hand, if you host your data locally, you can keep data that isn&apos;t public offline where it belongs.
		</p>
		<h3>Can&apos;t fix technical issues</h3>
		<p>
			When there&apos;s a problem with your own servers, you can fix them.
			Or you can have your technician on staff fix them.
			Or you can hire a third party to come fairly quickly (often times right away) to fix them.
			However, it doesn&apos;t work that way with cloud computing.
			You don&apos;t have any servers, so you can&apos;t get the servers fixed.
			If the cloud computing company&apos;s servers are having problems, your only choice is to contact the cloud provider, tell them about the problem, and wait for them to get it fixed (Mata, 2014).
			You may or may not even be able to get ahold of them right away, and if you can&apos;t, that adds further wait.
			You&apos;re utterly dependant on the cloud provider to perform all repairs and maintenance.
		</p>
		<h3>Conclusion</h3>
		<p>
			Cloud computing has a number of advantages.
			I&apos;m not saying that it doesn&apos;t.
			It can save your company money.
			It can make things easier, as you don&apos;t have to manage your own infrastructure.
			Cloud platforms may even have better uptime than what you can provide in-house (LevelCloud, 2015).
			But at what cost?
			I&apos;m not saying that cloud platforms should be completely disregarded as an option.
			However, the rush to the cloud is foolish, and if you&apos;re going to move to the cloud, you should really put some thought into whether that&apos;s honestly the best move for your company, especially in the long run.
			Cloud computing isn&apos;t always the best option.
			And if you decide that cloud computing is right for you, you need to do some serious research and choose a cloud provide that not only meets your technical requirements and budget, but also doesn&apos;t lock you in, as they might not <strong>*always*</strong> meet your technical requirements and budget, not to mention that a company that would try to lock you in isn&apos;t one that you can trust to have your and your company&apos;s best interests at heart.
		</p>
		<div class="APA_references">
			<h3>References:</h3>
			<p>
				Larkin, A. (2018, June 26). <a href="https://cloudacademy.com/blog/disadvantages-of-cloud-computing/">Disadvantages of Cloud Computing</a>. Retrieved from <code>https://cloudacademy.com/blog/disadvantages-of-cloud-computing/</code>
			</p>
			<p>
				LevelCloud. (2015, March 31). <a href="https://www.levelcloud.net/why-levelcloud/cloud-education-center/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-cloud-computing/">Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Computing</a>. Retrieved from <code>https://www.levelcloud.net/why-levelcloud/cloud-education-center/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-cloud-computing/</code>
			</p>
			<p>
				Mata, W. (2014, December 22). <a href="https://centretechnologies.com/5-cloud-computing-disadvantages/">5 Cloud Computing Disadvantages</a>. Retrieved from <code>https://centretechnologies.com/5-cloud-computing-disadvantages/</code>
			</p>
		</div>
	</blockquote>
</section>
END
);
